Areas of Expertise

Bessler has taught at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 2009. He has also taught at the University of Minnesota Law School, the George Washington University Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, Rutgers School of Law, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He clerked for U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Mason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, and practiced law full-time for many years in the area of civil litigation.

He teaches courses in civil procedure, contracts, capital punishment, international human rights law, and lawyering skills at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and he is also the faculty advisor to the moot court program. In addition, he is currently of counsel to the Minneapolis law firm of Berens & Miller, P.A., which handles complex commercial litigation, and is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. In 2018, he will be a visiting scholar/research fellow at the Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School. He was previously an associate at the Minneapolis law firm of Faegre & Benson (now Faegre Baker Daniels LLP) and a partner at the Minneapolis law firm of Kelly & Berens, P.A., now Berens & Miller, P.A.

He has written nine books, six on the subject of capital punishment, two on the origins of American law, and one on the craft of writing. His undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota is in political science, and in addition to an M.F.A. in Writing from St. Paul’s Hamline University, he has a master's degree in international human rights law from Oxford University. His law degree is from the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, where he was the Senior Managing Editor of the Indiana Law Journal. His law review articles have appeared in the American Criminal Law Review, the Arkansas Law Review, and elsewhere, and his books have received numerous awards.

His 2014 book, The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (Carolina Academic Press, 2014), was the recipient of the 2015 Scribes Book Award, an annual award given out since 1961 for "the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year." That book also earned the First Prize in the American Association for Italian Studies Book Award competition (18th/19th century category) and was the Gold Winner in the IndieFab Book Award competition for works of history. Bessler, a two-time Minnesota Book Award finalist, also recently edited Justice Stephen Breyer's Against the Death Penalty (Brookings Institution Press, 2016). That book reprints, contextualizes and annotates Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent in Glossip v. Gross, 135 S. Ct. 2726 (2015), a case that upheld Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol.

In 2017, he authored The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition (Carolina Academic Press, 2017), a bronze medalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (World History category). His ninth book, The Celebrated Marquis: An Italian Noble and the Making of the Modern World, will be published by Carolina Academic Press in January 2018. The latter book traces the global influence of the Italian philosopher and economist Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) on the world’s constitutions and laws. Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments (1767), had a major influence on America’s founders and early American laws.